Client_News

A permanent federal injunction now blocks Dallas from enforcing a controversial measure that would force all of the city's garbage to be taken to the McCommas Bluff Landfill.

Private commercial waste haulers and landfill neighbors were furious about the "flow control" ordinance that would have doubled truck traffic at the landfill.

Students from nearby Paul Quinn College wearing T-shirts labeled with the words "we are not trash" jammed City Council chambers when the measure was approved in a sharply divided vote on Sept. 28, 2011.

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"They had to absorb some of those costs, and some of those costs would have been passed on to the citizens of the city of Dallas, so consumers in the city of Dallas would have been ultimately harmed by this," said Jim Harris, the haulers' attorney.

The haulers also argued that their existing franchise agreements to operate in the city allow them the right to choose where they take the trash.

"That right was being taken away from us, and that's the irreparable injury," Harris said.